Unforgiven
by Summoner Luna
Summary: He enters the room because he has no choice. But he has always had a choice. [Irvine, Time Compression, and the past he can't escape.] [Time, Kompressed series]


_A/N: Trigger warning for domestic abuse and child molestation. Read at your own risk._

* * *

He should have been the first one back.

No—scratch that. He shouldn't have been there at all. None of them should. But like he told Squall, like he told all of them, if he was heading in one direction he was going to make it as much his choice as he could.

But he didn't choose this.

The sky is broken shades of grey, roiling quickly overhead, and Irvine is not naive enough to believe the clouds are just clouds. They are other timelines, other worlds. He could go to one, and he thinks he probably should. But the house looms in front of him, and he looks between it and the violent sky, and his own words echo in his brain, crashing into each other until he can't look up anymore from the pain of it.

 _I'm here because I chose to be here._

Was he?

In front of him a wooden gate swings just so on a broken hinge, whispering an _eerrreek, eerrreek_ into the grey nothingness around him. A breeze sent in from Time herself rustles the dead vines that creep over the fence, and a leaf blows from under the gate onto Irvine's boot. He looks down and sweeps it to the side, where it is caught in another gust and floats into the air, tossed back and forth like so much debris.

The last time he saw this house it stood in a row of others just like it, and it looked new, or as new as a house that's lived in can look. Not the broken, condemned place on the empty street in front of him now, with the rotting front door, and the roof missing more shingles than not. He sweeps his eyes over the skeletons left behind when the garden must have withered away, over the windows with their broken glass, avoiding the one on the left hand side of the second story. Above him a black cloud swells and surges forward, and a few white wisps follow behind.

 _…Selphie?_ Where is she, in all of this? Has she made it home yet? Have any of them?

 _Home._

He looks from the clouds back to the house and steps through the gate, cringing when it falls to the ground behind him, and walks towards the front door without hesitation. He has a home to get to. A friend. A girl. But he's here, and now if he leaves without…

He goes inside.

It's dark, and thick with the smell of mildew and rot. The only light is what comes in through the broken places in the dingy, clouded windows, and the house is a wreck. The furniture is shredded, large gashes cut into it not by time but by, he is certain, a madman, and over everything there is a layer of dust half an inch thick. He kicks some up when he takes a step and tries not to cough, for fear of disturbing whatever demons still rest here. Demons, he knows, that are upstairs if they are anywhere, and with that thought he lets his eyes wander to the wooden staircase. The third step up is completely broken, and one of the bars of the railing has been snapped off. He recognizes it as one of the pieces of wood he saw laying splintered in the center of the room, and the shadowed dents in the wall make more sense.

For a moment, he only stares. The dust he disturbed hangs suspended in the dull light streaming into the room, and through it the stairs look, for a moment, like an illusion. Like one of Selphie's limit breaks, like the World That Is is right behind this fake world of stained and broken wood, behind these stairs that led him to the moment his life turned upside-down. He stares, and he considers turning around, because there is nothing up there that he wants to see, nothing he wants to relive, in this timeline or any other.

And then the moment passes, and he takes a step, and then another, and then he is on the first of the stairs. He looks up and it is dark, and he pauses just long enough to remove his hat and hang it on the end of the bannister, a sign of respect for the memories that are waiting for him up above. The air grows thicker as he climbs, and he catches whiffs of blood mixed with the musty smell of abandonment—blood, and gunpowder.

His room is at the end of the right hand side of the hall, and hers is to the left.

He turns left.

There was a sign on her door, he always used to tease her for. Pink and purple with her name in cutesy letters, a little heart for the dot of the "i's." He called it girly and told her it was stupid, and she threatened to make one for him, if he didn't leave her alone.

He looks for it now in the darkened hallway, and almost steps on a piece of it. It fell off that night, knocked down by someone, though Irvine never took the time to imagine who. He feels it under the edge of his toe and reaches down, brushing off the grime until the letters form under his dirty fingers.

— _illian_ _—_

He looks for the missing piece that would complete her name, and he finds it. It is too shattered to recognize.

 _I'm sorry,_ he thinks, as he has so often, for so many years, and he pushes open the door—

—and he swallows a scream.

This is not the same broken room, not the same empty and haunted space as the rest of the house.

This is the night he left, the worst night of his life. The night that follows him now, in his nightmares, in his waking moments. The night he has never talked about and will never talk about, and it's staring him in the face, undisturbed by time.

His mother is on the floor, and he kneels beside her now just as he did then. Her black hair spills across the soft white rug, blood pooling out beneath her from the gash on her head. Glitter twinkles over her hair and skin, just as the dust he watched suspended in the air did earlier, and he traces his finger down the side of her face, catches a small piece of glass from the broken water globe that cracked her skull, and closes his fist around it, swearing against the pain.

He gets up. And he walks to the bed, and there she is, like she is in his memories every night. Young, and naked, and dead. Her body is bruised from the fight she tried to put up, and her throat is still marked red with fingers three times the size of her own, her face still stained with tears, and she is as beautiful as she is in his memories.

 _I'm sorry,_ he wants to say. For making fun of her stupid door sign. For not playing her silly games as often as she wanted him to. For going out that night, so he wasn't home in time to protect her, like he always promised her he would.

 _I'm sorry._

It's such an empty phase, and in this empty house, he can't think of anything more insulting to say to his sister's corpse.

He looks up slowly when the door slams shut, because he is not surprised.

His father (was he ever, though?) is not preserved, the way his mother and sister are. He is as ragged and aged as the rest of the house, and it's a wonder he is standing at all. In the dim light Irvine can see his eyes are still as bloodshot with drink as they were that night, but the madness is dimmed. He is looking at a ghost, as much as he is looking at a man. Irvine sees the slashed furniture, the broken bannister, the signs of insanity in a house trapped in time.

And If Time has trapped him here, forced to relive the horror he wrought, then it is still too good for him, and madness is a pardon.

"You…c-came b…back," the old man slurs, as if language is something he has forgotten. In his tone is surprise. Is regret. Is anger, and is self-loathing. He looks like he did that night, zipper still undone, shirt torn and a scratch from tiny painted fingernails across his cheek. The only thing different, is the holster he still had attached to the back of his belt is empty.

Irvine stands from his place on the edge of his sister's bed, and reaches down and pulls the light pink covers over her small body, and he kisses the top of her head and closes the lids over her eyes. He looks down at his mother, so much smaller in death. She does look like Matron, now that he really thinks about it. Maybe that was why he always loved her so much. Maybe that was why he couldn't forgive her. For not saving his sister. For dying.

And he looks at his father. Behind him, there's a hole in the wall, where Irvine's shot went wild, after he wrestled the gun from his father's belt. He missed, but it bought him time to run, to leave the house, the road, the town, to run until he found Garden, where he easily lost himself. Where he could avoid the family that had found him, accepted him, _loved him_ , but the family he couldn't save, couldn't avenge.

Light moves across his father's face, changing as the clouds outside shift. If someone dies here, in this compressed version of time, where do they die in the real world?

"I'm sor—"

Irvine pulls out his pistol before he father has a chance to finish speaking.

This time, he doesn't miss.

* * *

 _I really, really, really wanted to title this "My Shot," but I felt like that *might* set the wrong tone. ;)_

 _I've officially written two creepy time compression one-shots (the other being 'smoke and mirrors,' which centers on Rinoa and Julia), so at this point I may make a series. Or I may not. We'll see._

 _I also now have a headcanon for Irvine's backstory, which I haven't really had before. We get absolutely nothing about his backstory in game. The others we get a least vague mentions. Quistis makes a comment about her foster family, we know that Selphie had a very rich life at Trabia, Zell of course had the Dinchts, but... Irvine has *nothing.* I've always wanted to write something that explores his youth a little bit more, and a combination of the cover image (titled "fedora," by Jamie Betts Photo out of Richmond, VA-follow him on tumblr!) and the book I'm currently reading (The Onion Girl, by Charles de Lint. Ask me about him sometime. Or better yet, go check him out!) led to this._

 _Finally-I want to sincerely thank everyone has ever left me a review, in all the time I've been writing. Our fandom, quite honestly, sucks at reviews. I see so many talented authors who go largely without feedback. I'm certain people are reading their stories, they just aren't getting attention for it. And I get easily discouraged when I look at how many hits I get vs how many reviews I get, but I also know that I get more reviews than a lot of other people do. Every single one motivates me to keep writing. Not just fic, but it motivates me to keep working on original stories as well. And this is true for all writers. If you read something and you like it-review it. Review this. Review the next fic you read. Review one you read three years ago and have gone back and re-read over and over and over again because you love it so much. I guarantee you no matter what the author is dealing with in their real life, being told that will make their day suddenly bright, and will make all the heaviness of the real world a little bit lighter. And who doesn't feel better for having made someone smile?_


End file.
